SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is a mature, well-established, and widely deployed protocol for monitoring and managing large, complex multi-node computer and telecommunications networks. It provides simple data discovery, modification, and notification mechanisms for devices, which allows SNMP management platforms to easily manage disparate devices without requiring extensive foreknowledge of the details of those devices. As a result, it is being increasingly applied to manage more than computer and telecommunications networks.
Existing SNMP management platforms are required to introduce cellular device and network specific protocols into their systems in order to manage and monitor machine-to-machine (“M2M”) devices. In addition, managed devices are required to implement some support for the SNMP protocol. This approach resulted in relatively high development costs creating a barrier to new feature introduction and a high coupling between the management platform and the cellular and device characteristics, making on-going support and new device introduction cost prohibitive. Additionally, SNMP imposes unnecessarily high network traffic leading to prohibitive data usage charges. Lastly, SNMP is not highly compatible with the high latencies, intermittent connections and sessions, dynamic addressing and carrier roaming characteristics of cellular wireless communications.